An important stage in Allan Ramsay's life's journey had now been reached. He was of age, he was a burgess of the town, he was a member, or free, of one of the most influential of the Crafts, or Guilds, in the capital, but, greatest step of all, he had started in business for himself, and had flung himself, with a sort of fierce determination to succeed, into that hand-to-hand fight with fortune for the sustenance of life, from which each of us emerges either made or marred. At a time when all the youthful Ramsay's faculties were beginning to be strung to their utmost tension of achievement, strange would it have been if that of observation were not as eagerly exercised. Scotland in general, and Edinburgh in particular, were at this period in the throes of a new political birth. The epoch of transition commenced in 1707, and ended only when the dangers of the repeated rebellions of 1715 and 1745 showed the supercilious statesmen by the Thames--the Harleys, the Walpoles, the Pelhams--that conciliation, not intimidation, was the card to play in binding Scotland to her greater neighbour. A patriotism that had burned clear and unwavering from the days of Wallace and Bruce to those of the exiled and discredited Stuarts, was not to be crushed out by a band of political wirepullers, by whom State peculation was reduced to an art and parliamentary corruption to a science. Although the ultimate effects of the Union between England and Scotland were in the highest degree beneficial upon the arts, the commerce, and the literature of the latter, the proximate results were disastrous in the extreme; yet the step was imperative. So strained had become the relations between the two countries, consequent on the jealousy of English merchants and English politicians, that only two alternatives were possible--war, or the corporate union of the whole island. Yet in Scotland the very mention of Union was sufficient to drive the people into a paroxysm of rage. The religious animosity between the two countries was as important a factor in producing this feeling as any other. English churchmen boasted that with any such Union would come the restoration of Episcopacy north of the Tweed, and the abolition of the Church of Scotland. The latter retaliated by pushing an Act of Security through the Scottish Legislature, which demanded an oath to support the Presbyterian Church in its integrity from every sovereign on his accession. The Scottish Whigs and the Scottish Jacobites, despite political differences wide as the poles, joined hands in resistance to what they considered the funeral obsequies of Scottish nationality. For a time the horizon looked so lowering that preparations actually were begun in Scotland to accumulate munitions of war.